Saturday, May 13, 2006

Building a Better Site

Though the old
  • comicon.com site
  • has served me well over the years, it has been frustrating in many ways. From the beginning, text only was all I could update or alter, which immediately compromises a cartoonist/artist's venue. So the new site is going to feature lots of material you've never seen before, including -- well, you'll see.

    Still, it's a work in progress. Jane Wilde has accomodated my wish to build a multi-tier site, with many sections affording info/art/photos from the various elements of my life, career and interests. The initial launch will be skeletal, quite crude design-wise, with cumulative refinement and expansion of each section to follow in the coming weeks and months. I'm very much learning as we go, and if anything have too much material to post over the coming years.

    Among other things, there will be a gallery of unpublished art, an expansive bibliography, a section on script & thumbnails to completed page archives, and much more from the comics part of my life. This, too, will grow in time, and some of this material will be presented as 'lessons' (making them applicable to my CCS efforts, natch), which I hope will prove of interest to more than a few of you.

    Though I'm not putting any of my short stories online, I'll be archiving some of the 'best' of my published writing efforts and some the pieces I've written for this blog (illustrated!), and much you've never had access to before.

    For those of you with high-speed access, I'm sure the site will look archaic at best. Much as I'd love to include more interactive material, the hard reality is we here in Marlboro are still trapped in a dial-up age of internet, and that will limit what I'm capable of doing online for some time to come.

    Would you expect anything else from the dinosaur who did Tyrant?

    More later...
    ______

    Hail to the Chief

  • The USDA on Iraq: Everything's Coming Up Rosy
  • (Department of Agriculture employees have been instructed to praise, with a straight face mind you, Bush's handling of the Iraq war. They even are instructed to keep a record of how they've complied with the order, so the department can report back to the White House on how successful they've been.)

    By Al Kamen
    Monday, May 8, 2006

    Career appointees at the Department of Agriculture were stunned last week to receive e-mailed instructions that include Bush administration "talking points" -- saying things such as "President Bush has a clear strategy for victory in Iraq" -- in every speech they give for the department.

    "The President has requested that all members of his cabinet and sub-cabinet incorporate message points on the Global War on Terror into speeches, including specific examples of what each agency is doing to aid the reconstruction of Iraq," the May 2 e-mail from USDA speechwriter Heather Vaughn began..."
    etc. etc. etc.

    Who needs Paul Joseph Goebbels when you've got Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propoganda Karl Rove in the White House?

    Now we know what reshuffling Rove a month or so ago was all about...